THE idea of plucking characters from Shakespeare plays is not a new one, and the latest attempt, by Jonathan Shelley, has many good points.

But the play, which premiered at the Everyman's Other Space studio last week, is a curate's egg. In parts it moved smoothly through the gears and provided big laughs but in others it lost its way, partly by taking itself too seriously, and partly by the writer's attempt to shoehorn in too much genuine Shakespearean dialogue and too many corny jokes.

This was a shame because the basic premise was excellent, taking a number of Shakespeare's characters and trying to resolve their relationships - i.e. the Macbeths, Titania and Oberon from Midsummer Night's Dream, and Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado. After a slightly muddled first half in which we were allowed to get used to the characters and the situation, the scenes in which the women search for a mate for Beatrice were slick and deliciouslty funny.

Then it all went wrong as the play meandered through a long, though brilliantly executed, duel scene and an interminable attempt to sort out the Macbeths, which wasted about 25 minutes when we could have been in the bar chuckling over some of the brilliantly original gags. One is worth repeating, for the benefit of those blokey gatherings in the snug. Macbeth (Adrian Ross-Jones) asked: "If a man says something in a forest, and there's no woman there to hear him, is he still automatically wrong?"

The good parts outweighed the bad and this was a welcome addition to the Everyman's new writing project; with some judicious use of the red pen it would deserve a wider audience.

Review by STEVE EVANS